If he’s still there. She knows her daughter’s not an objective source, but from her description of him, well, if this truly is the Rapture, he’ll have gone too.
She managed to stop herself from crying before she set out, but she bursts into tears anew when she steps into the place her daughter called home more than their own trailer for so long. It’s through blurry eyes that she takes it all in, the old dirty sheets, the used grocery bags and boxes, the broken statue in the middle of the floor, and, next to it, the still very young man sitting there, looking shell-shocked, hands in his lap clutching what looks like Tandy’s old black hoodie.
“It’s true?” he asks, barely loud enough for her to hear him, when he sees her. Melissa thinks he probably knew the instant it happened.
This isn’t the Rapture. Melissa doesn’t know what it is, but it can’t be that. She refuses to believe any act of a just and loving God would leave a poor boy sounding broken in this kind of way.
Even if she herself, knowing she’s too much of a sinner anyway, feels a strange relief to walk over and sit down next to him. The loneliness that descended upon her when Tandy crumbled away abates.
“Do you know,” she asks, her voice all croaky, “if your parents…”
“Not yet. When everything happened, my dad told me not to risk contacting them. And now, when I’m pretty sure I’ve just lost my powers…”
“I can go to them,” Melissa offers. “No one knows who I am. They won’t connect me to you.”
“Could you go to someone else instead?” Tyrone scrambles around grabbing a scrap of paper, then taking the pen Melissa fishes out of her bag for him. “If she’s dead, you can try to talk to her aunt. She actually comes here occasionally, so she can go see my parents, and I’d like to know if she’s alive too. And if she’s wondering why we didn’t stop this one.”
Melissa shakes her head. “According to the news, this happened all over the world. You two…you’re only supposed to save the city, right?”
“As far as I know.” He sounds even more haunted now. “But…we weren’t supposed to both survive either. Even if this whole thing had nothing to do with us…I can’t help but think if I’d died in that Roxxon facility, or let poor O’Reilly kill me…maybe she’d still be alive.”
Melissa doesn’t know what to say to that. For a minute or so, she just sits there, feeling helpless.
Then she remembers what she was intending to ask, and asks it: “Do you want to come live with me? You’ve seen it isn’t much, but there’s room for you there now. If you stay here, I can’t protect you in the way Tandy did; I don’t have any superpowers, or her ability to lie. But I can still bring you food, and things like that.”
“That could be potentially dangerous for you,” he comments.
She shrugs. “I don’t care. I have nothing left to lose now.”
“Maybe,” he says, as if he understands. Maybe he does. “Give me time to think?”
“Of course,” she says, and takes the piece of paper on which he’s written two names and an address.